Chapter 155
Chapter 155
Kilmer--
Stockton is mostly useless, unsurprisingly. I sent him to surveil the older Ms. Ilyin days ago and he still hasn’t found anything actionable for me. She doesn’t leave the house much. She does grocery delivery, which must cost a fortune to have sent from her not-at-all local Russian grocery store. According to Stockton, it’s mostly stuff she could get around town, anyway– beets, beef, cabbage, and the like. She has expensive tastes in her hair and skin products, but she doesn’t seem to take care of herself in any other way. She doesn’t work out, she has an unpredictable sleep schedule, and she smokes like a chimney. She honestly sounds like a great match for Stockton, which is the main source of today’s headache.
“Look boss, I’m fully acknowledging that it’s a cliche, but those exist for a reason, right? It wouldn’t be a stereotype if it didn’t work! I just don’t see how I could get any closer any other way! I’ve already delivered her groceries twice. She’ll get suspicious if I do it again. Plus, it’s a small town. Somebody’s gonna notice the kid spending his bribe money.” Stockton has the phone speaker pressed too close to his mouth– he sounds like the kid through the speakers of a drive through.
I hold back my sigh. Everyone here knows how much I hate this fucking job by now, no need to rub their faces in it all the time. “I fully understand that, Stockton. It’s one thing for Ramirez to suggest this shit, but don’t you think this is reaching? Are you even attracted to this… woman?”
There’s a long pause on the other end. “I uh… do like them bigger, boss. Clearly, she can cook, and she’s got ass for weeks, man. My nephews would say she’s double caked up.”
“Stop it with the slang. We’re fucking adults, Stockton.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and think about it. I will be laughed out of command if I have two honeypot schemes running concurrently as my entire plan, but damn if Stockton doesn’t have a point. “Don’t give her your real name, don’t give her any information, and for God’s sake, Andrew, don’t give her a single shred of anything she could use to blackmail you. That’s this woman’s bread and butter, how she’s been supporting herself for decades. You’d better fucking watch yourself and her. Do you hear me?”
“Sure do, boss. Might take a minute to find my in, but once I do I’ll be getting in, ya hear me? I think I might be about to meet my next ex-wife.” He hangs up before I can stop him.
I glance around my office, instinctively making sure that the blinds on my windows are closed before I let myself relax. “Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Fuck, fuck. We’re so damn fucked. Fuck.” I give myself a few more seconds of pity and frustration before I straighten back up. The rest of the team doesn’t need to know that I’m at the end of my rope already for this investigation. They don’t need to see me falter for a second.
That’s the problem with leadership. I can’t confide in my team, and the sensitive nature of our job ensures that I can’t confide in anyone else about it either. I could go to the state-sponsored head shrink, I guess, but that seems like the fast track to a forced retirement “for my own mental health” and I’m not ready to give up yet.
Maybe next week.
As for this week, we have a few angles we can still work with, and I plan on sending those off as well as humanly possible. Carmen Ramirez is working on an angle to get onto Oliver Lopez’s staff, since we found Derek Loup’s secretary to be a highly rated one that had previously worked with Úlfur– and he helped negotiate her contract with Loup’s company. Carmen’s “gut feeling” is that it’ll be easier to get into Lopez’s company. I don’t think it counts as a gut feeling when there’s evidence to back it up, but she insists. Drew is supposed to be working on finding out what Cora found online that outed the other werewolves, but he hasn’t made any progress the last two times I asked and I’m disinclined to ride his ass about it.
I glare at the mountain of paperwork in front of me. Apparently, I’ve run out of productive procrastination I can do. I know for a fact that most of that paperwork is Ramirez’s bullshit, with a smattering here and there of the others fudging their hours to make it look like they actually do any fucking work here. I know I deserve this penance though, after how I failed my first team. It’s a lot easier to forgive any slack on the team when you have some relationships to fall back on, but then I would hesitate to send them into the danger required to get their jobs done. No one here tells me about their sick moms or anything like that– I can’t afford to let them. The only problem is that I’m a lot less patient with them, too. As long as Drew and Ramirez don’t fuck this up, we can still salvage this operation.